Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

Kricket Brixton puts lid on container

Kricket, the modern British-Indian small-plates pioneer, is closing its original venue – a former shipping container in Brixton – at the end of May.

Founders Rik Campbell and Will Bowlby opened their 20-seater in the Pop Brixton community project in June 2015, and expanded into permanent Soho premises earlier this year. They are now looking for a new site in or around Brixton to run concurrently.

Serving seasonal British ingredients cooked with Indian seasoning alongside spiced cocktails, Kricket earned rave reviews and the endorsement of top chiefs including Pierre Koffmann and Michel Roux Jr. The 2017 Harden’s Survey describes it as “a brilliant and totally delicious, fresh and wonderfully subtle fusion of southern Indian and European food”.

A “last supper” will be served at Pop Brixton on May 27, featuring greatest hits from the Kricket menu including Keralan fried chicken (pictured), bhel puri and crab meen moiliee.

Their container at Pop Brixton, which is scheduled to stay in operation until the autumn 2018, will be taken over Smoke & Salt, a three-year-old pop-up that specialises in brining, curing, fermenting and smoking. It will be a first permanent venue for chefs Remi Williams and Aaron Webster, who has worked at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and the Latymer at Pennyhill Park in Surrey.